The Two of You
by Desdemona Kakalose
Summary: There is something frightening and fascinating in how similar you are. A collection of scenes for the ATSD AU in which everyone is human, and the whole adventure takes at least a week. We are getting into that freaky stuff.


_The Two Of You, _or: _I Found a Brand New Boyfriend, and It's Me_

Emperor Doofenshmirtz is into that freaky stuff. You heard the man.

* * *

"To be honest, Ferb, I'm having a hard time putting a positive spin on this one."

* * *

It's been less than a day since you arrived here. It's been a busy eight hours, what with all the inter-dimensional doppelganger secret agent ninja fights and angry children and apparently you _are_ capable of ruling at least one section of the world with an iron fist, but now things have calmed down. You're playing the waiting game until your Perry turns up or gets dragged in, one or the other. You're _delegating_.

The two of you are in his office with the high lavender windows. You're kicked back in your seat across from his empty seat, offhandedly explaining about how you're really benefiting from this whole _change of scenery_. This place is a definite improvement, it's got _great _color coordination and there's no parking meters, no vending machines, no snooty smiley brother—

"Brother?" he echoes, flipping over a desk ornament that doesn't agree with him. It's a little model of the old DEI building, like yours. You figure from the way he's turning it over that he's thinking the thing is due for an upgrade.

"Rodger," you say, "the mayor?"

He lifts an eyebrow at you. You can tell he thinks you're an idiot, which is just unfair, really. You're the same guy. If anyone should be on your side, it's him.

"When I took over the tristate area, Danville had a lady mayor," he tells you, apparently losing interest. "Some Hirano woman. I never had a brother."

You pause, and you think about that. It's inane, but what you really wonder is whether he ever had to go through the Year of the Dresses, like you did.

"No brother," you say, rolling the words around in your mouth. "No Rodger."

He shrugs.

You try to imagine. You fail. "So…" you say, "Mother loved you?"

He ignores you, rummages through the papers on the top of his desk, and pulls out a blueprint with a flick of his gloved hands.

"Here," he says, "what do you think of the Goozim pit design? I think it needs more spikes."

—

Perryborg pushes through the door empty-handed, and you know immediately there's going to be trouble. Your double turns, takes one look at him, and points at the floor in front of himself, like he's calling a dog or something.

Perry slips past you, doesn't even seem to notice you, and stands in front of the self-styled emperor.

"Nothing," he says, hands on hips. "You got nothing."

Slowly, like a rusted machine, Perry shakes his head.

"Alright, knees."

The cyborg drops to his knees. He's still got a stocky sort of remnant of the real Perry's grace, and he sits back, waiting. You shuffle a little closer. You haven't got the slightest idea what's going on, but come on, it's Perry! This is your nemesis! Sort of! Whatever's going on, you've got to see it.

The other Heinz lifts one black leather boot and nails his Perry right underneath the chin. You think your eyes must go wider than saucers. Perry tumbles back and lands flat against the floor, some of his circuitry making mechanical noises of protest.

"You know, when I tell you I want something I expect you to _get_ me something," your double says, leaning down over the expressionless body. "How hard is it to track down a couple of brats and yourself? He's not even augmented, it should be a piece of cake. Maybe you need an upgrade."

He lifts the same boot and presses it down squarely into Perry's throat. You can see the prone body flinch, just slightly, but he still doesn't say anything. You start to get nervous. You always assumed your Perry could talk, if he really needed to, so this—is every Perry actually mute, or is this one—did this Heinz—

Your double grinds down.

"Look," he says, "it's not that hard. When I give you an order, you don't come back till you've got it under control. Perryborg, if I ordered you to get me some milk from the corner store, would you come back without milk? Hmm?"

You can hear faint wet noises from Perry's partially open mouth.

"Of course you wouldn't!" he goes on.

You feel lightheaded.

Up until this moment it's been kind of like a fantasy, this city and this you, but this is the moment when it finally becomes personal. Truth be told, violence is a more tangible reality for you. The high blown neon and the black leather upholstery don't carry the same sort of gravity as a boot to the throat. This, you're familiar with.

The neurons start flashing while you're standing in the corner with your hands in your pockets. And you're having flashbacks of what's happening to Perry right now, right here, or at least to some version of Perry—one that you don't know. It's happened to you. And while his trachea is collapsing under the weight of your double's heel, you're remembering.

Perry's breath is coming out in a low hiss, a helpless resigned _hhaaa_. He doesn't move, he doesn't shift, he doesn't wrap his huge mechanical fingers around the scrawny heel of your double. His eye doesn't even flicker. He just stares up, barely blinking, into the empty air or the ceiling, while a boot crushes his windpipe.

And you can feel that—you can feel that in your own throat. Your hands are in your pockets but you want to reach up and grab the skin beneath your chin just to make sure that no one is kicking you as well.

This is the moment when you start to perceive that there is something more, something more different between you and him than his being 'the grumpy one', or besides the ability to recognize someone—_apparently_—with or without a hat on. There's something there in the smile he's smiling right now, something you've seen in too many faces. But you don't say anything. You just stand there in the corner, with your hands in your pockets, and you wait until he seems like he's finished.

There's part of you that must be in him that can't look away from the spectacle. Well this is your nemesis, right? Or, it's his nemesis, and he's you, and the two of you are on the same side, aren't you? His win is your win, or something. If he's grinding the air out of Perry, hand hung across his knee, then it's basically you there too. If Perry is gasping and tipping his chin back slowly, like his whole body is going through mute and carefully modulated convulsions, then—

That part of you wants to know what it feels like to be the boot, and not the throat.

You shiver and twist the lining of your labcoat.

You can't decide if it's actually a relevant thought, or if you're just trying to distract yourself from all this uneasy philosophizing, but you find yourself wondering what Francis meant when he said this man was into that _freaky_ stuff.

—

The two of you show up in matching suits for dinner. He's telling you, as he slicks back his hair in the mirror, that it's just the usual political here-and-there, like you have any idea what he's talking about. You tell him _grreeeeeat don't let me keep you,_ just in case he really thinks you actually do know what he's talking about. You don't want to spoil it, on the off chance.

"Oh heck no," he says, making a little _psshh_ gesture with his left hand. "You're coming with me. Wait till the guys from Cuba get a look at _us_."

"Cuba?" you echo, losing track of your bow tie. Great, now you've got to start over. "You run the _tristate area_, what are you having foreign ambassadors over for?"

He puts his hands on his hips. It looks awfully compelling, you don't know how he pulls off half the things he does. "Well _naturally_ Danville is a sovereign city state," he tells you, rolling his eye.

"Eheh. Uh, naturally."

"The world's biggest exporter of robotic appendages," he adds, turning his attention back to his reflection in the towering mirror. "Second biggest importer of lawn gnomes. Switzerland beat us in the last quarter but I think we've got the next one in the bag."

"Oh," you say.

"It's quiiiiiite a stranglehold we've got on the market," he says, "big players on the international scene, that's us. Everybody wants a piece of me. Not to mention we have all the _doomsday_ devices, you know just last Thursday I was showing the Chinese president—"

He goes on but it all kind of buzzes right past you. You had no idea that there was anything _after_ successfully taking over the tristate area.

Here and now, the two of you burst through the doors to the dining room in your matching suits. There's fanfare and a disco ball and _yeah_, this is style. This is the way to live. You blow a jaunty kiss to the men and women sitting around the sprawling mahogany table as the emperor strides towards his seat at the head of it.

Perryborg is still flanking you though, the way he does whenever you go anywhere that isn't your double's office, and that brings you down a little from the swagger-lights-introduction high you're trying to ride the heck out of right now. He's so _quiet_. The suits sitting around the table look at him with wide terrified eyes and you think you could work yourself up to feel smug about that bit, if it wasn't that—you don't know, he makes you uneasy.

One of the normbots pulls out a seat for you at the right hand of the table head. Your double doesn't introduce you, and that's a little funny, but hey whatever, if he wants to play mysterious mansion with the guests then you're not gonna spoil his fun. Probably. Well you might get a _little_ over excited and spill something, it's been known to happen.

You lean in to the guy next to you, the one in the cute little bolo tie. "I used to have one of those," you say, giving him a comradely grin. "Lost it in a scheme, yanno how it is, great accessory though—"

He smiles an uncommonly toothy smile at you and practically rips the thing off of his neck in his haste to shove it into your hands.

"Wow!" you say, "That's generous of you!"

He keeps smiling, sort of wide-eyed? People are a lot friendlier when you're at the top, you could get used to this.

You turn back to the other you, who's making a speech about international ties of friendship and good will, and also the fact that he just completed another really impressive doomsday device. All around the room people are eyeing you, trying to figure out what you're about. You grin at them. _Could he be a clone_? You imitate their shrill bewildered voices in your head. _How can the world support two such handsome devils in the same space? Will we all be sucked into a void and doomed to float helplessly above the event horizon if they touch?_

Maybe you'll come within a millimeter of brushing his hand, just to mess with their heads. Your skin hovering over his skin. The idea appeals.

Around come the plates. You lean over to the guy next to you again, peering into the florid depths of his dinner plate. "Yeouch," you mutter, "you got the schnitzel-sushi-casserole. He must reeeeally hate you. What country are you from again?"

The guy starts sweating.

Your double makes a noise at the head of the table, where he's got his chin propped up on his hand, watching you. It sounds like a laugh, mostly.

"Scaring the guests?" he asks you, eye narrow and lips twisted up. "Yeah, that's pretty fun, but here, lemme show ya the _real _party games."

He twirls his hand and, like magic, there's a remote. It's just got the one huge red button, and for a minute you think it's a self-destruct of some kind and you start to turn, look around, figure out what it goes to so you can duck for cover. He just grins though, and he presses the thing down.

The chair beside you rattles—you rear back, out of the line of fire—and then the floor drops out from under it in a _whoosh_ of wet air and hydraulics. The chair plummets. You grab the sides of your seat and crane your neck as much as you can to look down there, where your newly minted acquaintance is now making friends with a couple of antsy looking sharks.

People stare very hard at their plates while the screaming dies down.

You look up at him.

He's got this smile, his chin is still on his fist, and you think that it could be an invitation to share the joke. This feels a lot like when Roger and the village kids used to laugh about you over your head, only this time you're on the inside. But there's something—that same something you noticed before—

You recognize as much of yourself in the identical faces of pale dread around this table as you do in the face that is actually, literally yours_._

—

"Come on," he says, "haven't you ever?"

The bed is huge and covered in pillows and dark purple velvet—you are _so_ jealous—and here you are, perched uneasily at the very end of it, with your hands fluttering over the duvet. The bed is so high off the ground that even sitting you would be at eye level with him, if you weren't currently hunched into yourself and staring at the floor.

You bite your lips and fiddle with your hands and think back to a couple bitingly cold winters when you were young, and you think that it would be nice if the worst true thing you could say about those days is that you once cut open a horse and slept inside it. That's pretty terrible. You mean, it's gross, right? Maybe it _is_ the worst thing, actually, it's just not the most embarrassing.

"Well," you hedge, "I never exactly—it doesn't count if you…"

He's giving you that really intimidating look, the one with the eye patch and the narrow lids and the flat mouth and he looks so unamused, he looks a lot like your father, he makes you want to start rambling and never let up until you finally stumble across the right combination of words.

"Maybe… once or twice," you admit, under the full force of his glare. "When I was young."

When you were an illegal immigrant living out of a van, sure, no surprise there. When you were a kid, living in the woods, working the only jobs you could get? That's no big surprise either. You look around at the snazzy décor and the portraits on the wall, and you think about that stupid train, about Rodger, and part of you goes sour.

"I guess you probably never had to," you add.

He shrugs. There's a lot of things he won't tell you and it's positively driving you crazy, you guys share the same DNA for Pete's sake, what's he got to keep so secret from you?

He leans in, and you can see in the half-twist of his lips that he thinks he's won. You guess that—it was probably inevitable, you never learned how to control your self-destructive impulses and he is _not helping_—he probably has.

"So, _Heinz,"_ he says, throwing an arm over your shoulder. "Give us what we want."

-—

It's been a week.

You're nose to nose, your hands are on your hips and his are crossed over his chest, and there's no reason why you can't be the boss!

You are pretty tired of getting pushed around. It doesn't even matter any more that this is his palace and his regime and his bed, seriously _whatever_, he's been periodically reminding you of that for a week now and you've come to the conclusion that you actually could not care less. You're just as strong as him, probably more—probably a _lot_ more_—_and maybe it's time you reminded him of that.

"You listen to me," you say, tipping up your chin. "You don't even—"

His hand shoots out, snaps closed around your throat, and you stumble back into the wall behind you with a dull thud. You blink and try to regroup as his wraps the other hand over your neck too, soft black leather over your pounding jugular.

Jeez.

He just raises an eyebrow challengingly at you while you're gasping for breath.

His thumbs are leaving heavy hot bruises on your throat, and your hands are scraping at the plaster of the walls. You try to squeeze out a sound but he chokes the noise right out of you, it's mostly mute and barely louder than your thumping frightened heart. You know he's just trying to make his point, he's so pushy, you know he'll let go—but your heart? Your heart doesn't know.

Your lungs are starting to beg for oxygen. It's just little whimpers of adrenaline now, but you know any second now they're going to start screaming, you can tell from the way your hands are shaking against the plaster. Or were they shaking already? You reach up to grab at his fingers, pry them off you, but his grip tightens vicelike over your delicate windpipe, and he says in a voice like darkness in an endless forest, "Bewege dich _nicht_."

Your hands slam palms flat against the walls. Your whole body goes ramrod stiff.

That seems to be good enough for him, because he finally lets go. One hand hovers, like a threat, above your collarbone, but the other slips down. His fingers move so lightly, tracing a dotted line from your clavicle to your hip, a surgeon marking out the line of incision. You shiver against the touch—maybe the surgeon metaphor was a little too close to home? You think of Perryborg, and you feel that familiar mixture of fascination and fear.

His lips get thin at the involuntary shudder that's rippling through your muscles. He pulls back and rams his elbow into your chest, so hard that you curl up around the injury and sink to the floor, fighting for thick heavy breaths.

"I said don't _move_," he growls down at you. "What part of _bewege dich nicht_ don't you understand, _Heinz?"_

You want to tell him you understood—you want to tell him that you know, you heard him, you're sorry, you didn't mean to, honestly, you didn't mean to—but your lungs are completely incapable of doing anything but sucking in wet, desperate breaths right now.

"You're un_believ_ably pathetic," he says. "Look at you! You're a grown man and you're still cringing like a dog—you know what? Actually I take that back, you're worse than the dog. The dog had some self respect."

You know, you know you know you know.

He kicks you. It's not hard enough to do more than bruise your ribs, but it draws a weak little moan out of your abused throat. He buries his glove in your hair and he yanks you up, onto your knees.

"I," you start to say. The air isn't coming in like it should. "I," you try again.

He grabs your hand and presses it flat against his thigh, and you grasp instinctively at the smooth black cotton of his pants. Gosh they look good on him, you want a pair too, they could look like that on _you_.

You shove away the long hem of the lab coat and fumble with your left hand at the fastenings, haste and adrenaline making your movements unsteady. Jeez that's pathetic. You want to swallow everything you can get your mouth around.

He's probably going to choke you again.

You lick your lips.

—

You collapse, sucking in heavy gulps of air while the last of the buzz works its way out of your nerves, down your limbs and out through your digits. Neither of you says anything.

His warmth disappears, briefly, leaving you alone on the floor remembering winter a long long time ago. You run hot with sickly sweet loathing. And then he's back—he's shifted all his clothing neatly back into place, unlike you, you're an absolute mess. How typical. He pulls you back into his lap and runs his still-gloved fingers over the bruises forming on your midsection, pushing up the black hem of your turtleneck to get his hands on all the dark sore places.

One hand cups the front of your neck, like he's going to strangle you again, and you suck in a nervous breath, but he only thumbs the bruises there. It's almost reverent—well, you don't think he could ever be genuinely reverent, but it's a little like that. He moves his hands in such a way that you can feel the fascination. You're fascinated too. He grabs one of your hands and brings it up to your throat, so that your thumb and forefinger are digging into the dark spots he left behind.

You have the same hands. His and yours cover the same space, have the same bony tips and strong thumbs. This could be your hand on his neck just as easily as it was his on yours. You know this. You don't think he knows that you know.

He smiles into your neck, you can feel the wet flatness of his teeth, and you're not stupid even though he thinks you are. You know he's not smiling because he's thinking anything nice.

Maybe he thinks you would, but you kind of don't care?


End file.
